Summary: Voluntary Care In Hospice Patients

Volunteers worked with hospice patients to support their emotion, they engaged in conversation with patients, made them laughed, did relaxing things such as looking at old photos, and brushing their hair while they were in the hospice care. They mainly focused their attention on providing emotional support for the patient and their family member as they go through the hospice process instead of the patient's problem. Some volunteers chose to volunteer with the hospice patients because they were motivated to experience the loss of loved one, and others were simply happy to give back to their community. In hospice patients (P) does encouraging patients to share their memories improves their mind-state (I) compared to not reflecting on past experience
(O) within six months (T)? Searched through online database CINAHAL and retrieved article of interest. In CINAHAL, the words "Hospice" was typed in the search box, English language, and full text box was checked. Articles were narrowed down to one nursing research article that had been published within the last five year. Once the article was found, summary of the article was read in abstract, and PDF full text was downloaded. The reason for the article was to explore psychological, cognitive, behavioral, and emotional issues related to voluntary care in hospice patients.
The article was qualitative research, level five of evidence because the study was based on interviewing participants to find solution to psychological issues. The study recruited nine British volunteers from ages 21 to 84 year old. The study had more female participants than males, some of the participants were retired with several years of experiences. The volunteers were asked during the interview to talk about their personal experiences in a private area face to face with the researchers. The participants gave their permission to the researchers to record the interview. Since the interview was based on the participants’ experiences, qualitative design was used to collect data on things that they thought were an essential aspect of volunteering. This gave them an opportunity to speak about several things they found helpful to patient. Grounded theory was an act of theoretic framework based on the data instead of imposed from the limited pre-existing literature. The researchers used this theory to analyze data manually to prevent software problems such as losing format, and enable to recognize sentence when coding (Elliott & Umeh, 2013). The authors used this theory to analyze the volunteer’s personal experience in the hospice care to eliminate any assumption people may have about the study since it was qualitative research
(Elliott et al., 2013). Another way the authors collected data was by scrutinizing the interviewees’ response carefully, and assigned the correct code for each. They wrote memo by transforming data into theory, compare and contract one piece of data with another piece that were different, and reviewed codes the . They also formed similar group with theme memo and identified five ideas which made theoretic framework. The study provided understanding of cognitive and behavioral challenges the volunteer begun to deal with in hospice, and these challenges related to patient, and external factors (Elliott et al., 2013). The Volunteer envisioned themselves in the patient's shoe and gave them emotion support for their feelings. They found their personal skills as an important part of volunteering. The authors stated that more research was needed on whether improving in home training on volunteering skills would increase recruitment. and understanding of these areas would also prepare other program in the future. Nurses have many patients they have to provide care for every day, they do not have time to sit down with hospice patient, but the best treatment they can provide for them in their condition is to take little of their time to look through their old photos album, or play games with them. This may seem like time consuming for nurses but doing simple thing like taking a few minute to communicate with patient’s make them laugh and relax. This article help nurses keep in mind Nurses can use the information from the article as a remainder when they are caring for hospice patient at the hospital to provide emotion support. This article will help nurses understand that assessing hospice patient spiritually and emotionally is extremely essential, and it is part of holistic view. They need to focus more on patient’s psychological wellbeing and help them reminisce on things they did when they were younger. Listening to patient tell stories about their past experience does not only make the them feel happy, but it opens door for the nurse to learn intriguing things that you did not know about the patient before, and that may help the nurse view the patient in a different way. This article can be useful in the health care practice, nurses can encourage patient to talk about the things they had done in their lifetime, and also apply it in their field to improve patient’s mental status. Volunteers support patient’s emotion by helping them remember an important events in their lifetime, and they have conservation with them about it.
Some of the volunteers provided services like brushing patient’s hair and assisting them in their activity to help them stay calm and relax. Volunteers took hospice patient’s emotion very serious, and they did their best to help them feel better by doing simple thing such as getting their manicure and hair done. The main reason for the article was to examine psychological problems volunteers had to deal with while they were in hospice care. The study was qualitative research and level five of evidence because the interview was based on the interviewees’ experience with hospice patients, and the authors used qualitative design which allowed volunteers to talk about the things they had experience. Then, grounded theory was used during data collecting to analyze interviewees’ statement about their experience to eliminate any bias about the study. This article gave several ways nurses can used to help hospice patient and their
family.